HORIZONS OR PERIODS: These Are Time Units
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by ASU Digital Repository 1998 ARIZONA ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY LECTURES: PALEOINDIAN AND ARCHAIC TRADITIONS IN THE SOUTHWEST (MODIFIED 2001) TERMS AND DEFINITIONS TRADITION: A pattern of human behavior which is identified by a particular technology and which occurs over a long period of time. Minor changes occur through the duration of a tradition. For example, the pattern of manufacturing stone projectile points of lanceolate (leaf-like) shape identifies the Eastern Paleoindian Tradition, though the points are shorter and fluted early in the tradition and longer with parallel flaking later on. CULTURES, OR WHAT CORDELL SOMETIMES CALLS “COMPLEXES”: These units of archaeological analysis or interpretation are identified by a suite of attributes of the archaeological record – such as a style of projectile point and a pattern of subsistence and settlement – that are believed to be the product of a particular human population. The population is thought to have lived in a certain territory at a certain time, to have shared common customs and lived in much the same fashion, and probably to have communicated through use of a common language. HORIZONS OR PERIODS: These are time units. Often we do not know the true antiquity of an episode of time; only that it is older or younger than some other episode. It is not unusual to name a horizon or period after a complex or culture that existed at that time. Thus we often speak about the Clovis culture as existing during the Clovis horizon. STAGES: These units are often given the same name as cultures or horizons, but are really quite different. A stage is an episode of cultural evolution that is characterized by a particular form of adaptive behavior. The prevailing theory of cultural evolution applicable to North American prehistory recognizes five stages of cultural evolution: Paleoindian, Archaic, Formative, Classic and Postclassic. The Paleoindian Stage is characterized by the earliest form of cultural adaptation to New World conditions. The Archaic Stage is characterized by the economic behavior of hunting and gathering modern (not extinct) forms of plants and animals. The Formative Stage is characterized by economic patterns involving sedentism and food production. These stages of cultural evolution are not necessarily sequential in any given area. Some complexes that evidence the characteristics of the Archaic Stage, for example, are much younger than some that evidence the characteristics of the Formative Stage. 2 INTRODUCTION This course is set up to allow one lecture period to deal with the archaeology of the Paleoindian Horizon and one lecture to deal with the Archaic Horizon. Though this arrangement isn’t surprising in such a course, I find it curious. It isn’t surprising because courses in Southwestern archaeology traditionally emphasize the dramatically elaborate and sophisticated cultures of later horizons, with their abundance of architectural and ceramic artifactual detail. Most archaeologists, as well as most members of the general public, think about Southwestern US archaeology in terms of puebloan communities, cliff dwellings and the like, and books like Cordell’s cater to that perception. The history of archaeological research by American scholars also has been important in setting this tone, for during the first half of the 20th century archaeologists were thought to have the job of pushing the boundaries of known history back ever more deeply into the pre-Columbian period. This meant archaeologists concentrated on working back from the so-called “ethnographic present” of such aboriginal societies as the Navajo, Apache, Pima, Zuni and Hopi to the time of their immediate ancestors. This course organization is curious, though, because in combination the Paleoindian and Archaic Horizons account for at least 10,500 years of Southwest prehistory – possibly twice that amount of time – while all the other archaeology you will hear about in the course, combined, will cover only the 1800 years between 300 BC and 1500 AD. Because so little time is available to me to lecture about the archaeological record that encompasses such a long period of 3 time, I have to take certain shortcuts. First, I will not speak much about the nature of the artifacts and the sites that make up the archaeological records of these horizons. I leave that to Cordell’s text and to additional readings I hope you will find it interesting to find and pursue. Second, I will encourage you to question the substance of my lectures and bring up ideas for discussion. There may not be too much of that in this first lecture, because you’ll just be getting used to my style. But if you prepare yourself for my second lecture by reading Cordell’s Chapters 4 and 5 carefully, I think you may have a number of interesting questions for me that will engage others in the class as well. By the way, notice that I said it would be helpful to read the text carefully. Cordell is pretty easy to read, but I think you’ll find that like most things written by archaeologists there’s a great deal more to a given paragraph or section of the text than first appears. Careful reading of archaeological work often means that you have to go over it a second or third time, and you may have to outline how a chapter or section of a chapter is organized, to get most of the good out of it. Third, if I find that the Paleoindian lecture and question period which follows it have not taken up all the time allotted tonight, I may start the discussion of the Archaic Horizon this week and not wait until next week to begin it. PALEOINDIAN I’m going to skip over the problems that would be involved determining the duration of the Paleoindian Horizon by speaking first about the Paleoindian 4 Culture Stage. That is, my lecture will begin by dealing with the episode of cultural evolution characterized by the earliest form of adaptation to conditions existing throughout the New World, as well as here in the Southwest. Analyses of Culture Stages focus on adaptations. As we speak of the Paleoindian Stage, then, you must keep in mind that human adaptation is not the same as that of any other organisms we know of on our planet, because humans are the only cultural animals. Human beings adapt to their biophysical and their social environments through both somatic, or genetic, mechanisms like any other animal and through culturally conditioned behavior. So human adaptations are more complex than those that control the evolution of other organisms on two grounds: first, human adaptations may be either genetically or culturally controlled, and, second, human social environments are more complex than those of any other animal and are thus subject to more rapid and more frequent changes. Human adaptation, then is a much more dynamic phenomenon. So human evolution proceeds in ways and at a pace that is quite different from that of other organisms. I could present this discussion in terms of the ways archaeologists have researched the character of the adaptations of the Paleoindian Stage, but that’s not the way we’ve actually come to know about such things. What archaeologists who specialize in these matters have done is to identify six issues of archaeological interest which are usually posed as questions: (1) When did people colonize the New World? 5 (2) What was the culture they brought with them from the Old World; particularly, how were they pre-adapted to any new biophysical and social environments they encountered in this hemisphere? (3) What route did they take? (4) How was their culture changed or otherwise affected by the character of Pleistocene and Early Holocene environmental conditions and change? (5) What are the major outlines of cultural history that occurred during this stage of cultural evolution? (6) What are the major varieties of cultures that developed during this stage of cultural evolution? To understand archaeological thinking about the answers to the first three Of these issues, you need some historical perspective. You must remember that radiocarbon dating was not invented until the late 1940’s, so for the first half of the 20th century the only secure way to tell how old an archaeological culture was was to relate it stratigraphically to something whose geological antiquity was already known. Until the mid-1920’s, no archaeological materials had been found in the Americas that could be geo-stratigraphically dated as more than 3000 years old. Prevailing opinion was that though some stone tools were cruder than others, so could be older than those dated in this way, one couldn’t trust the assumption that crudity was an index of antiquity. So human colonization of the Americas was though not likely to have occurred much more 6 than 4000 years ago. The reason that the Folsom discovery was so important is that it demonstrated that human beings had hunted an extinct form of bison in North America. According to geological estimates, those animals did not survive the mass extinction which occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, so people had to have hunted in North America prior to 10,000 years ago. Then came the evidence of an even older archaeological culture, Clovis, whose population had hunted mammoths. Since the Pleistocene was the time of the ice ages, during the 1930’s and 40’s archaeologists theorized that the original colonists of the Americas were Late Pleistocene hunters who followed big game animals such as mammoths across the Behring Sea on an ice bridge that linked Siberia and Alaska. This reconstruction fit neatly with the evidence that modern Native Americans shared more biological features –such as eye and skin color and hair form—with the modern peoples of Siberia and Mongolia than anyone else, and with the evidence that Late Pleistocene human groups in Europe and in Asia were big- game hunters.